Reply #42: They're interns.

[Igel]

Thing about internship programs is that they have extremely high wash-out rates.

Intern in year 1, intern year 2, and you're looking at a higher wash-out rate than student teaching + 2 years in the classroom.

I've known teachers who have done the intern route to certification and they all say it's unwieldy: First-year teachers that have been fairly well trained have no time to eat or breathe, they're so busy with stuff at school, wrangling paper, preparing lessons. Now, take a new teacher who isn't well trained *and* has to continue their own training.

There's positive feedback on new ideas that work. In this case, it's not a new idea. Moreover, it doesn't really work. For a few thousand $ you can pay for a post-bac program that provides better training than TFA does *and* includes student teaching (this also isn't a new idea).

Could it get worse for our children? Yes. In trying to increase our ranking administrators have two choices: They can get the bottom 25% of students to do better or get the top 25% of students to do better. The bottom 25% has a bigger impact, feels good, has all the right ideological content behind it. But in working on the bottom 25% you take time to review, review, review--and unless you have enough good students to form separate classes *and* there's no obvious racial/religious/ethnic skew to peeling out the good students you warehouse them in classrooms that are reviewing and reviewing and reviewing. Those few additional percentage points at the bottom show up in the rankings--but the real drivers of scientific and engineering innovation aren't those students, but the 10% at the top. They're "privileged" and "advantaged," so we don't give a hang about them. It's bending the future innovation curve downwards.

The usual come back is that a good teacher can find work to keep the high-achieving kids engaged. Right. You teach two courses, differentiate both courses for limited-English proficient students, handle the special needs kids' IEPs, help teach reading to the junior at a 7th grade reading level, deal with the kids in the class that failed last year, deal with classroom management issues, reporting requirements, and the incessant high-stakes standardized tests and what do you get? A teacher who's already swamped being told that because s/he can't differentiate two courses 9 ways each instead of the 8 ways s/he already needs to and the 3 ways there's actually time for.